Untangling how cables coil
The world’s fiber-optic network spans more than 550,000 miles of undersea cable that transmits e-mail, websites, and other packets of data between continents, all at the speed of light. A rip or tangle in any part of this network can significantly slow telecommunications around the world. Now engineers at MIT, along with computer scientists at Columbia University, have developed a method that predicts the pattern of coils and tangles that a cable may form when deployed onto a rigid surface. The research combined laboratory experiments with custom-designed cables, computer-graphics technology used to animate hair in movies, and theoretical analyses. In the lab, MIT engineers set up a desktop system to spool spaghetti-like cables onto a conveyor belt. They adjusted parameters such as speed of deployment and the speed of the belt, and observed how the cable coiled as it hit the surface. At Columbia, computer scientists adapted a source code used for simulating...